Jeremy Minton About

There is a conventional explanation given about discriminative and generative classification models. One good example of this is Bishop’s Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning 1: Chapter 4. As a quick summary:

  1. Bishop, C.M.; 2006; Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning; Springer. 

I am trying to learn more about frequentist statistics. This post is an attempt for me to clarify some frameworks and mental models to better structure the selection of tools and processes written about in the field. If I’ve made any mistakes, oversights or omissions in my generalisation, please get in touch.

Trying to travel more with my remote work has motivated me to search for ways to reduce network traffic in my workflow - and hopefully save some money on mobile data plans. This would have the additional, although less significant, benefits of reducing build times and reducing energy consumption.

A small, but frustrating, behaviour with my default installation: within the terminal/shell “Ctrl + Left” outputs ;5D instead of jumping left to the end of the word, and equivalently with “Ctrl + Right”. My current installation is nixos with alacritty/zsh and the relevant configuration is

    programs.alacritty = {
        enable = true;
        settings = {
            font.size = 6.0;
            colors = {...};
            window.opacity = 0.9;
            key_bindings = [
                { key = "C"; mods = "Control|Shift"; action = "Copy"; }
                { key = "Insert"; mods = "Shift"; action = "PasteSelection"; }
            ];
        };
    };
    programs.zsh = {
        enable = true;
        defaultKeymap = "emacs";
        enableCompletion = true;
        shellAliases = {...};
    };

Why develop in docker environments

I’m wanting to experiment with Julia. It’s been mostly Python for me over the last four or five years so the first hurdle is to get Julia installed and running smoothly. Conda works nicely to manage environments for Python so I gave that a try with installing Julia from CondaForge. I started following this tutorial and quickly hit a problem: the Distributions package wouldn’t install.

Migrating the website to GitLab

The first task was to recover the original source code; this was hosted on an old server before github/bitbucket were offering free private repositories. I had setup the website domains to direct to cloudflare so couldn’t use those for ssh. The IP address had to be recovered via the Linode interface and luckily (or irresponsibly) being able to guess the old password.

Implementing global optimisation is not uncommon but is sufficiently complex to not want too roll your own solution, especially for more complex cases like quadratic or mixed integer programming. Fortunately, there are many packages available that provide this implementation and Python has wrappers for most of them. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a beginners guid for choosing which package to use. That’s what this article intends to provide.

Apparently there is some discussion somewhere about being able to import from parent directories. Long story short, I think, is that it was deemed that this is a poor way to structure modules, however, for work which contains run scripts in folder within the working directory this would be a useful functionality.

Merging Branches

Call ‘git fetch’ if necessary to fetch refs from other repositories, then

git checkout <branchToContinue>

so the current branch is the one that will persist.

Creating a Branch Locally

This will create a new local branch called ‘localbranchname’ which will be a copy of the currently checkedout branch.

Jekyll was something I was told about from a friend of mine from College, James Black, and appealed to me for a few reasons. The increased security, lack of databases and lack of updates all appealed. My recent love affair with git makes having everything in text files quite attractive and coding in vim is always better. But my main reason for exploring this was the ease of customising behaviour without the wordpress framework monolith looming over you.

I have recently been thoroughly sold by the benefits of Git. It is a revelation that came slower to me than many of you, probably because I haven’t worked on projects large enough or high risk enough to warrant that sort versioning and I have never seriously been in a situation with that level of collaboration.

Given three vectors x, y and z containing two locations and data values, a useful interpolation function is,

Early January, 2014, I was involved in the Global Game Jam at the Bristol Games Hub. Over the course of a weekend (25-26 Jan 2014), teams competed to make a computer game around the theme of “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” with the added challenge of making this ‘accessable’.